Humble Electronics #008 - PAD - 234 Analog/Digital Trainer 01.0 (Summer 2023)

My husband was at an estate sale and sent me photos of stuff I might like. I didn't know what this was but I told him to pick it up for me.

It turns out to be a complete kit to do electronics in a great portable case. I found a listing here on Amazon and one here and a build it yourself kit here. 

The operator's manual that came with mine said it was last revised 7/94. It contains basic information on the power supplies and how to use the various areas of the board. It also includes schematics for the various sections. If I'm reading the power supply schematic correctly, it is a linear power supply. The caution page says in bold letters not to use all of the sources at the same time. It also lists the main fuse at being only 0.5 A. I don't think I should run a motor from this but maybe a tiny toy drone one would be OK. I don't think I'll risk it.

There are many sections to use. I'll go through them one by one in this post and we'll get to some measurements and limits in another post.

The surface is dominated by a large breadboard in the lower right section. The purple outlined section in the upper right is the power button. It should be off when building a circuit.

The section outlined in red, to the center left, are the binding posts. From top to bottom, there is a Clock, Generator, +5V, +12V, -12V and Ground female jack that a plug and/or a wire can be inserted. I have my ground connected across all four power rails on the breadboard using wire. I also have the +5V wired to one of the rails for my V/A meter. The numbered, single value, outputs have power indicator lights.

The section outlined in blue, on the left, are the adjustment knobs. From top to bottom, they are: Waveform: sine, triangle and square, Coarse Frequency: 1, 10, 100, 1K, 10K, Fine Frequency, Amplitude, Offset, Voltage Adjustment: +V, -V. The frequency adjustments affect both the Clock and the Generator. You do need an oscilloscope to see the results. The signal is often off center so the Offset adjustment is important to see. 

Above the breadboard, the section outlined in orange are the DC adjustable voltage rails, one for positive voltages and one for negative voltages, and an AC output of 60 Hz with two 6.3V rails with a ground rail in the center. When viewed on the oscilloscope the two 6.3V rails are offset by 180 degrees.

To the right of that section, outlined in pink, is the extender output and it's connector rails. You can wire a 16 pin connector to another device and supply power and have rails to hook into the device's output. There is a description of where each pin goes which will be discussed in another post.

At the top towards the left, outlined in aqua, are a set of eight toggle switches. Each can be toggled high, 5V, or low, 0V. It can be used with logic circuits/chips to observe output on the eight LEDs on the right under the power switch, outlined in green. The LEDs each have two holes underneath to wire them to your circuit and are internally grounded.

Between those two sections, outlined in yellow, are two momentary switches that produce a single pulse. There are two rails under each switch, one labeled 1 and one labeled 0 to produce a high or low, respectively, temporary condition.

It's an interesting case and has a lot of potential. I'll go over some specs and some of the user manual soon. I don't know what I'm going to do with it exactly. I have a couple of test circuits I'd like to figure out so I might do that next. But that's for later. I'm still catching up on summer. In the meantime

Happy Making!

Michelle